Barbara Hambly's Blog, page 45
February 28, 2011
I'm still here...
It's just been a busy and difficult couple of weeks.
But, a question...
Is there a way to link these blog posts to my Facebook Page? A friend who uses Wordpress says it's easy from there, and thinks there should be a comparable feature from LJ. Is there? And if so, how does it work?
And, I really will get to the subject of Ishmael and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe...
February 20, 2011
Voyage to Gallifrey
There was a fellow in the dealer's room selling plushy-toy stuffed microbes. I bought measles and tuberculosis - they didn't have smallpox - and syphillis, for an upcoming lecture on Things the White Man Gave the Indians and Things the Indians Gave the White Man (for the Black Death lecture I already have a stuffed rat). His booth was one of the grossest things I've ever seen - AMAZING collection of plushy-toy germs, lice, and ants... www.gmtoystore.com.
So, an evening spent doing the work I should have been doing all weekend...
February 13, 2011
And that's why we study history...
I finished the rough draft of Dark Souls - Ben January # 11. The final is due Real Soon. But, this is my favorite part of writing: second draft. Taking the story to its real form, now that I know what's going on inside peoples' heads. Being able to hunt around for quotes or small statistics (like how many British forces were engaged at the Battle of New Orleans, or what kind of ship the Turkish consul would send a guy to New Orleans in from Havanna, and how would you get out of the hold if you were locked up down there chained to the wall?) (A brig, I think - and I'll have to re-watch Pirates of the Carribean - 1 to get a closer look at the brig that Will and Captain Jack steal. And if anyone knows someone who has a brig in Southern California who'd be willing to take me out in it, please let me know!)
Much school work to be done tomorrow, heading into Week 2.
And, not much work to get done next weekend, because Saturday I'll be at a one-day meeting of the Greater Los Angeles Writers Society doing a panel with Harry Turtledove on Research, and the following day (Sunday) I'll be at the Gallifrey One Dr. Who convention. I always forget to make announcements like this...
February 10, 2011
Spring
Then a long, cold drive home over the hills in the darkness.
I notice in both classes - I'm teaching US (Colonial-to-Civil-War) and Western Civ 2 - I'm picking up a number of repeaters, students whom I've had in other classes. I still remember one semester where I had what seemed like half the college basketball team: all these enormously tall, enormously earnest black kids who were trying really hard to keep their grades up.
A lot of work to do today - and Warcraft tonight.
February 4, 2011
Research
Simple solution - change the one sentence in the screenplay to, "Like when I smash my Bild-a-Brix together?" instead of "Like when I smash my Legos together?"
Lunar new year: starting on my sixth cycle of years in August. Viewed in that way, I feel cheered rather than "Oh, jeez, I'm going to hit THAT AGE."
February 3, 2011
Another Research Question...
If you made two trucks out of Leggos and smashed them together full-force, would they break into their component Leggos?
Lovely day yesterday with a friend: we trolled the Fabric District, had unexpectedly excellent tamales at the El Pollo Loco near Levine's Fabrics, then ended up in Little Tokyo - where she had never been and I haven't been since my karate days. Much buying of strange things, including a flattened half-cube of pink padded plush with a slot in the top, like a little pillow the size of my palm and one knuckle of my fingers but twice as thick, which turned out to be a cell-phone holder. (!?!) (Is there a name for such a thing in Japanese?) Some of the best chirashi I've ever had at Oomasa restaurant, though an ill-judged cup of green tea resulted in virtually no sleep afterward - and much work to do today.
January 30, 2011
Hmmmnn...
A question. I'm extremely fond of Tomb Raider, but the part that I'm fond of is the swinging-over-chasms, jumping up walls, collecting treasure part. I'm not really into combat and I can't do the boss battles (mostly because I don't have the time to get good at it, the way I would if I were in Middle School and somebody else was supporting me...) And, I like the prettiness of it.
So, given that I've got an XBox and Windows Vista on my computer, what other games would you recommend? (I can deal with a little bit of combat, but I've washed out of two other games I enjoy - Brutal Legend and Inferno - simply because I couldn't get through the first major boss battle. I generally can only play for an hour at a time. If I can't get through a boss battle in an hour of trying, that one goes back on the shelf.)
A second question. Is there a good Civilization-style history game - Rome or the Middle Ages for choice - that comes on Vista? Most of the ones I see on Amazon seem to be Windows 98, and I truly don't want to futz around with Emulators.
January 29, 2011
Yay!
January 21, 2011
Dragonsbane
DRAGONSBANE
It’s a little difficult to talk about Dragonsbane.
It was a VERY difficult book to write – I think Lester made me re-write it about three times – and it was written under stressful conditions.
Back in the ‘70s, not a lot had been studied about the physiology of karate with regards to the different pelvic- and leg-structure of men and women. At the time there was a great deal of macho emphasis on, “No pain, no gain.” Training through pain was part of the deal – I remember breaking fingers in class and having Sensei pull them straight for me and tell me to go on training. I did. My friend Anne said that she thought she’d cracked her sternum at one point in a tournament, but never got it looked at. For one thing, none of us had medical insurance of any kind.
But the result was that a lot of the women in karate in those days went out with bad knees. I recall very clearly feeling something pull loose behind my kneecap during class one night. I finished the class, but limped into the office afterwards and said, “Sensei, I’m taking a month off.” I never went back.
Shortly after that I reached the decision to leave Riverside and move back to the Ontario area, where my family and the core of my lifelong friends lived. I moved into a condo that was clearly designed for someone who wasn’t home during the daytime (it had only one small window in the downstairs). I don’t do well living in dark places. My friend Laurie later remarked that it was no accident that the book I wrote while living there took place ¾ underground.
Still, Dragonsbane is one of my best books. It's one that I'm very proud of having written.
I originally wanted to call it Dragonslayer, but the movie of that title came out while I was working on the book, and Dragonsbane worked better anyway. Because of course the book isn’t about slaying dragons.
The book is about love. And love, as Morkeleb the dragon says at one point, is “not a thing of dragons.” Love turns out to be the dragon’s bane – the thing that wounds him where weapons can’t. It’s why Jenny chooses mortality and humanity: because she understands that she wants human love more than she wants power.
And since the book was also about power – about wanting to have more talent than you’re born with – I knew up front that I had to come up with a hero who would be emotional competition for a dragon.
John Aversin is a fun character to write. He has the heart of an medieval scholar who’s been forced into being the only law enforcement in a bleak sub-arctic area the size of France. As a medievalist, I’d read all sorts of weird things that scholars in the Middle Ages thought were cool: lists of words, beastiaries, long discussions of etymological roots, fragments of histories and legends. They'd argue about these things for years. Because civilization has collapsed in the Winterlands, John only has the fragments of this learning. He’s a little like Leonardo da Vinci if he’d been born in the Dark Ages instead of the Renaissance. Like several of my heroes, he’ll go anywhere and do anything to get hold of a book, and will sit up all night talking you to death about cabbages and kings if you’ll let him.
And Jenny, much as she loves him, feels that same love towards magic. And magic needs solitude, and silence, and study, all the more so because Jenny’s inborn talent is pretty mediocre, and she was not well taught.
It’s a complicated relationship – and a difficult book.
I pictured Morkeleb as a thinner, snakier version of a Chinese dragon, with wings. The wings are sheerly for steering. Dragons fly by means of levitation. (I studied a lot of stuff about pteranodons and wasn’t going to try to figure out the physics of dragon-flight). That’s why they have that very sudden take-off, straight up into the air. I saw dragons as being extra-terrestrial, perhaps from a different dimension. They’re semi-material (hence their shape-shifting and size-changing abilities, which I got into in the later books), and snotty as a tribe of Renaissance Spanish aristocrats. Like carp, they can be gaudily patterned, and the patterns change over time as their minds mature.
And one of the things I loved most about that book was coming up with why dragons crave gold. All legends say that dragons horde gold. I don’t think I ever had read a good version of WHY. I’m pretty proud of that element, if I do say so myself.
Most of the time I was writing that book, I was depressed and unhappy. One night I bought some paint and painted the upstairs bathroom as a tromp d’oeil of the observation deck of the Starship Enterprise, with a window and starry blackness and an immense spiral galaxy.
During the time I lived there, I got involved in writing Saturday morning cartoons. My friend Laurie had started a relationship with science fiction writer Mel Gilden; it was through Mel that I met writer Michael Reaves, who at the time was working on He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. This was at the beginning of the era of what we called “Toaster Shows”: toy company makes a line of vehicles that turn into robots to fight evil vehicles that also turn into robots => toy company hires production company to make forty-eight half-hour episodes which are essentially commercials for these toys => production company (in this case, DIC) sends out a casting-call for all the bush-league science-fiction writers in LA, and offers them very small coinage for scripts. Bush-league science-fiction writers all pay their rent.
And party together a LOT.
More about this next time.
I started spending a lot of time driving from Ontario – where the condo was – out to DIC in the San Fernando Valley. My car had no radio. I loved the sound of the road noise, the tires on the asphalt.
I lived in that condo for exactly two years. My brother lives there now, though a tenant between myself and him painted over the observation deck of the Enterprise. Laurie moved out to Venice (“Where the debris meets the sea”) and not long thereafter, I got an apartment in the same complex as she did. I turned in Dragonsbane shortly before I made the move. It wasn't the only book I wrote there.
Up until the final pass through the final draft, I hadn’t made up my mind whether Jenny would go with Morkeleb, or go back to John.
January 9, 2011
Physical presence
Still, I was fascinated - unexpectedly - by the costumes on display, because they gave a sense of physical presence: size, shape, bulk. John Lennon was very medium, almost slight compared to someone like Neil Diamond, whose costumes look like he's well over 6 feet tall. Jimi Hendrix was tall, though he didn't give the impression of size that I got from Diamond's outfits. (The one Elvis-suit there was so glammed up it was sort of hard to tell anything about the man's size or presence, only his taste - if you can call it taste - in clothing (if you can call it clothing).) In the Lennon exhibit also I had the weirdly exhilerating experience of actually reading a word in Japanese and knowing what it meant - there was a Japanese video about the song "Imagine," with Japanese subtitles on the interview, and I actually recognized - read - the word "shiroi" - "white." (Appropriately enough, given Lennon's aesthetics at the time he recorded the song).
The costumes reminded me of my favorite exhibit at Mount Vernon - the Houdon bust of Washington (done when he was 56 or 57), which is mounted on a plinth to put it at the level you'd see it if you were actually standing next to him. The effect of this is stunning - Washington was a TALL man, and by all accounts had enormous physical presence, false teeth notwithstanding. (And they were NOT, and never were, wood - which would have swelled out of shape after a few hours inside a mouth - though Paul Revere did make him a set of silver choppers, which must have been pretty startling when he smiled). I don't think he could have eaten wearing any of his several sets of false teeth.
On the subject of eating, our excursion unfortunately concluded in a Rapid Food Emporium near the Museum, where we had a very nice lunch... And where I can only assume that the kitchen staff did not exercise Due Diligence with cleaning prep surfaces after they'd prepped shrimp on them. I started getting sick within half an hour of reaching home, and spent a poor-quality night.
